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So one commenter said that "Journals are used as a proxy for quality", another that they loose so much time browsing through low-quality papers. Isn't the root

by blaze33 10y ago

So one commenter said that "Journals are used as a proxy for quality", another that they loose so much time browsing through low-quality papers. Isn't the root issue that we need an open and standard way to review, sort and rate all those academics papers ? Developing voting, flagging, moderating mechanisms, that's what many developers have done for years now on the web. Obviously you wouldn't rate papers like reddit comments but plug arxiv/sci-hub to a system allowing researchers to say what papers they reviewed, what their degree of approval is, eventually where it's been published, who references this paper etc. Seems like Arxiv has an endorsement system but as they say "The endorsement process is not peer review", just a way to reduce spam. Isn't there anything done on this subject ?

bryanrasmussen 10y ago
well there is one way to rate academic papers that has proven pretty successful, and that is citing the paper in other papers - however sometimes that can take a long time to find the quality.
- fsloth 10y ago
  "however sometimes that can take a long time to find the quality." As a non-academic but with some insight there - this matches with most research, I think. Upvoting at a heat of the moment is kinda worthless as it comes to rating academic output. You need quite a lot of time to draw valid conclusions about a paper. If everyone voted for every paper this would mean that a huge chunk of the competent population would spend an inordinate amount of time on a single paper. That's why it's far more efficient that only a few people of more-or-less guaranteed competence spend considerable effort in reviewing results. One high-quality vote is much better than thousand low-quality ones. This efficiency mechanism and validating the qualifications of the reviewers is the only added-value the established publication systems brings in to the table as discoverability has become cheap commodity.
  - blaze33 10y ago
    I'm not advocating for anonymous instant votes like we can do it here. Researcher already do peer-review for free, allow them to do it on an open platform with free publication afterwards, I don't see why it couldn't work.
ufo 10y ago
In my experience, the problem is less about papers being low quality (wrong, incomplete, etc) and more about the papers not being precisely about what you are looking for (which is hard to tell looking just at the title).

by blaze33 10y ago

bryanrasmussen 10y ago

well there is one way to rate academic papers that has proven pretty successful, and that is citing the paper in other papers - however sometimes that can take a long time to find the quality.

fsloth 10y ago
"however sometimes that can take a long time to find the quality." As a non-academic but with some insight there - this matches with most research, I think. Upvoting at a heat of the moment is kinda worthless as it comes to rating academic output. You need quite a lot of time to draw valid conclusions about a paper. If everyone voted for every paper this would mean that a huge chunk of the competent population would spend an inordinate amount of time on a single paper. That's why it's far more efficient that only a few people of more-or-less guaranteed competence spend considerable effort in reviewing results. One high-quality vote is much better than thousand low-quality ones. This efficiency mechanism and validating the qualifications of the reviewers is the only added-value the established publication systems brings in to the table as discoverability has become cheap commodity.
- blaze33 10y ago
  I'm not advocating for anonymous instant votes like we can do it here. Researcher already do peer-review for free, allow them to do it on an open platform with free publication afterwards, I don't see why it couldn't work.

ufo 10y ago

In my experience, the problem is less about papers being low quality (wrong, incomplete, etc) and more about the papers not being precisely about what you are looking for (which is hard to tell looking just at the title).